Roger Reynolds – Watershed (Music)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: B-     Extras: C     Main Program: B-

 

 

Some musicians, especially in Rock and instrumental music lately, are trying to do something different and ruin it.  They go wrong when they think they are reinventing the wheel and being more innovative than they actually are.  It is painful to see talents Forrest Gump their way through their work after a certain point in which they become self-satisfied and give up not really finishing what they started, no matter how good.  Watershed offers a bunch of double-talk about visual vs. non-visual music and trying to find a way to have sound that disassociates itself from images in a new way.

 

He and his fellow performers here think they have done it because the way electronic music is made has no traditional source that is immediately visual.  Made in 1998, they are about 25 to 30 years too late to achieve what they think they have done.  The music itself is not bad, but nothing so memorable and sometimes sounding like ground long broken.  The title work, and additional works like Eclipse are abstract music in the Jazz/Classical tradition you may have heard in the 1960s, and making it from electronic instruments does not change that much.  The same goes for the audio-only Red Act Arias, freed from the visual pretension the others offered.  This is also good material, but the across-the-speaker pans are more about updated radio drama than music, another medium they seem to know nothing about.

 

The video itself is analog, abstract, and unintentionally silly.  It adds up to little, and nothing is here that Andy Warhol or Jean-Luc Godard have not already done.  Eclipse looks like a combination of the climax of the original Logan’s Run (1976) and scenes from John Boorman’s underrated Zardoz (1973) in various moments, yet those had great narrative purposes to hang on to.  And that trying to rationalize it by saying this is art freed from narrative are doing the same self-censorship or “Gumping” that makes this possible.  Get real!

 

With all that, this is still good music on its own, with some fair interview and technical extras, including a DVD-ROM section, but the sum of them is not anything spectacular either.  Mode Records is at least being ambitious in releasing such titles and the sound choices of Dolby Digital 5.1 and 24Bit/48kHz PCM 2.0 Stereo are the truest highlight of the disc, as fidelity separates this music from older works a bit.  We only recommend this for diehard abstract music lovers.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo